Recent reviews by ☆LoneWS☆

This game isn't a game, it's literally a full blown driving simulator where the limitation is your setup (and skill lol). Want to play with a keyboard? sure! Want to use a decked out sim rig to get the most accurate feeling experience? absolutely! As for tailored experiences, this game can either help people learn, or give a lot of fun for the experience one might already have.

-The driving in some aspects are unrealistic to the real world, however, as a person who played this game before getting in the drivers seat of a car, and actually having a drivers license, it's close enough to reality that you can learn how the American road/highway systems work. As for interests in real world truck driving, this sim is spot on with the physics of the trucks making it a safe way to learn the maneuverability of trucks and trailers. I personally know of 2 people who played this game/ETS that have been able to apply the skills to the real world.

-The gameplay is pretty decent. There is no story or predetermined path as it is up to the player to do point A to B jobs with trucks and various payloads. However, the game requires some forms of advancement to gain access to certain aspects. ie, having enough money to buy your own truck, garage, trailer etc. Owning a business and hiring drivers is an aspect, but not crucial to the gameplay. Some may argue that the jobs and how they run are not realistic enough, however, the driving aspects are more crucial for what the game is set out to do.

-Multiplayer is as expected. You can drive around with friends in convoys. You be be as wreck-less or as tame as you want, and have a fun time doing it. Latency can be an issue with convoys, but vehicle contact is never necessary.

I mainly recommend this sim for the player experience, and also the knowledge and skills that can be gained for new and inexperienced players.

It is a fun sandbox-like racing game where you can race, wreck, or completely destroy your opponents! You also have many great vehicles to choose from, where many require working up to get. With the many customization abilities, no one car in an online lobby is the same.

Long term review update:
I do not recommend this as a simulator as I would have 5 years ago. It is unbearable with a steering wheel, handles like complete garbage, and races feel like an arcade game more than actual real life banger races. The objectives of the races are more towards who has the best upgraded vehicle, and not much of skill. The vehicles that I had 5 years ago, are completely different, and no longer perform as well as they used to.

If the arcade feel is what you are after, and like crashing cars spectacularly, I recommend this game for those reasons, plus, the action can be very fun, especially in private lobbies. Car customization is still pretty fun, but is obviously limiting.

Overall, great game.
-Game-play is very straight forward, except may be a tad bit confusing to very new players. You can put as little or as much effort into your raft as possible. There is no way to soft lock your progress, as you are not required to have everything to beat the game, as long as every step is completed in the story.
-The visuals are amazing, as it hits the niche spot between realistic and cartoony, not requiring insane graphics to make anything up, meaning great and equal experience for people on low end systems. Building up rafts allow for a ton of creativity, and, components like engines or water purifies give the feeling of everything being literally recycled from the garbage in the ocean, fitting everything into a single uniformed theme.
-Multiplayer is fun, has no issues with lag, and latency is non-existent. Everything in the game has the same feel in either multiplayer or single-player, so playing with friends won't ruin any experiences with game-play. The only issue with single-player relates to deaths, as you are required to have a friend bring you to a bed to revive, if not, you loose a bunch of stuff.
-Enemies can be a bit annoying and/or too easy depending on how they are dealt with. Never had issues with deaths.
-The story can be confusing if not followed 100% of the time. Best experienced in single-player. Some aspects fall short of expectation, and the progression of the story can feel too fast when approaching the final story location.

Everything aside, it has been an amazing game to play with friends, and provided a lot of relaxation time in single-player. The ability to build up your raft as big and as beautiful as you want has allowed for a lot of creative thinking.
Highly recommend Raft for the player experience.

I have started my steam account with Gmod as the first game around about 2015. At the time I joined some Storm Chasing communities and settled in a one where I had the chance to meet a lot of people, and make friends with a lot too. At the time, and there still are, many communities that were open to new people, and had great environments. There is really no one community that is the same as many have different goals, with the exception of having the same game-modes.

The open ended nature of this sandbox game allows for very easily tailored experiences for anything that anyone is interested, ie my niche Storm Chasing hobby.

This game may not be great for someone interested in mechanical engineering, as the physics are never really on-point, however many addons make the experience more tailored for those potential interests.

I have found this game fun mainly for the Roleplay experience and ability to meet many people with common interests, which is why I deeply recommend this as possibly one of the most diverse and universal games to exist, for anyone to get started with.

(updated 7/6/24)

As a long-term player, this is my updated unbiased review based on what Scrap Mechanic is advertised as. I will discuss what you can actually expect out of this game as not stated on the store page.

There are a lot of things to bash this game at its core for, however, I will only be focusing on what you can make of it from a creative engineering perspective.

General review.

Scrap Mechanic does many things that other physics sandboxes don’t do, but it also has its fair share of limitations due to how it was designed. The game was initially released as a creative game, however the devs are focused on the story side of survival mode (which hardly contributes any value to your experience in this game, more on that later). The best experiences can be had in creative mode where you are left with basic components to build whatever you imagine. This is also the only game, from my experience, that can allow you to dynamically change between what you want to do, whenever you want, in the same world. You can build a simple car, advanced cars with complex suspension, cars with piston-engine-powered drivetrains, flyers, boats, complete cities and road networks, gorgeous terrain, etc. It’s for this reason that just about anyone can pick up the game.


The bad.

This game is very rarely updated, leaving many bugs to appear, but even if there is a bug, you can’t count on the developers to actually fix them. Instead, throughout the years they managed to fix bugs that actually benefited our own creativity.

The game optimization (for now) is pretty bad. You can’t count on this game to do any large scale mechanical builds without suffering from performance loss. If you are into static builds and simple vehicles however, this is not an issue and you will have a fine experience.

Survival mode is over-hyped. TLDR; it is completely boring, and there isn’t much of an ‘adventure to engineer’. Everyone ends up coming to the same conclusions on how to play survival, and it only takes a couple months to get bored of grinding for resources with no real end-goal. As for the ‘story’ of survival, besides the background lore, there is no story. If you want to play the game because of survival, or for a supposed story, this isn’t the game for you.

There is no central community. If you want a community, you will need to seek small communities that specialize in certain aspects of the game, or you can choose toxic youtuber communities.

There is no developer feedback. The devs for this game are locked behind a wall and there is no way for the community to connect with them to share ideas which could further enhance our creativity, as such, we are stuck with only getting things we don’t actually need. Due to the investment into survival mode, besides extra building parts, it has been many years since anything was added to benefit creative players.


The good.

The mechanics of this game creates a nice platform for building mechanical contraptions. Anything from car suspension to full scale steam locomotives, require varying levels of building skill to achieve, but all possible with basic joints; bearings and pistons. Unlike other various building games, motion is based on the game’s free-body physics engine, rather than preset components with fixed function. This is what allows just about anything to be possible.

Aside from being a nerd, this game is pretty fun to mess around with friends, though multiplayer can have its limitations.

This game has amazing communities of people who specialize in various parts of the game, and push the game extremely hard to get the most out of it; from extremely detailed builds using glitches, to creating extremely complex and powerful vehicles using piston power and advanced game-breaking mechanics.

There is support for modding, with many mod developers actively seeking to make the player experience much better.


Final thoughts.

Survival mode is basically dead in the water for most long-term and experienced players as it is a completely unnecessary component of the game. For what the developers want to do, survival mode could be a completely different re-imagined game that does not take millions of years to complete. At the end of the day, both game modes end up serving two separate types of people which creates an unfortunate split in the community. Besides survival, this game feeds the creative needs, and that’s just about all you need from a game like this. I love playing it to push the boundaries of creative mode and find ways of creating new experiences. Besides my own creativity, the lack of updates and improvements to the game let down my motivation to play it at times, especially with my own developing life pulling me further away from being able to play these games in the first place. If you are in grade school, this is a perfect game to help build interest in various engineering fields.

Update on my original review:
This game can be horrible for people with low spec systems, and I would not recommend in that regards. However, even on a 4 core system with no dedicated graphics, I used to get 30+ fps with a single vehicle with no ai traffic, which was enough to have some fun.

New long term review:

This game had a fun experience for just crashing cars and messing around with the crazy physics, and still does. However, the experience into more than just a crashing game, has given so much more potential. Racing vehicles is the most realistic part, for the physics is for real, and actually applied, not simulated (sorta). Getting involved with a steering wheel makes for a more fun sim racing experience, especially for the vehicle building and tuning aspects.

Not only does it have a fantastic racing feel, but it also allows for training on vehicle control. If you loose control of a vehicle in this game, you can replicate it in real life, meaning you can learn how to control or maneuver a vehicle as it applies to the real world. Not only that, but stunts you wish could be done in real life, can be done safely in the sim, while still giving that chance of a glorious wreck.

Overall, recommend this game for the open ended vehicle based sandbox game that it is, and the potential skills that it can develop for the inexperienced.